Abstract:Rice false smut disease is an increasingly concerned problem in both rice research and production. Diverse resistance germplasm is the most important factor in resistance breeding program for controlling this di-sease. After three years of screening in our disease nursery in Sichuan Province, out of 843 accessions we identified 179 that showed no occurrence of false smut disease and two accessions that were highly susceptible with diseased panicle percentage more than 50%. The rest accessions had diseased panicle percentage ranging from 0.1% to 48.8%. More than half (55.1%) of the infected panicles formed only one smut ball, but the number reached up to 38 in the most susceptible accession Pujiang 6. Then we selected 36 accessions for further evaluation of disease severity variation at two locations with 2-3 planting times with Pujiang 6 as a susceptible control. Three of the 36 accessions showed no disease in all these experiments, and 18 accessions were occasionally infected and thus were highly resistant to false smut disease. In order to find accessions with the highest polymorphism to the susceptible accession Pujiang 6, we performed polymorphism analysis between 35 accessions and Pujiang 6 by using 450 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. Twelve accessions showed polymorphism to Pujiang 6 in more than 10% of these markers. IRAT144 was at the first place with 16.1% of polymorphism rating, followed by Luxiang 90-2 and Domsia-2 with 14.8% and 14.4%, respectively. Thus the 12 accessions were selected to cross with Pujiang 6 to construct gene mapping and cloning populations.